My little boy is growing up!

My little boy turned 4 the other day! He loves to help around the house, especially the kitchen so we decided to throw a Cooking Birthday Party for him. I looked for ideas on Pinterest and other sites, while trying to figure out in my head how I was going to keep the interest of 8 kids ranging from 18 months old to nearly 6 years of age for several hours.

The first thing I had to do to prepare was to make some signs and party favors. We decided to turn the formal dining room into a "restaurant" and named it "Kevin's Pizzeria" after my son, of course. And if we were to have a "restaurant" we better have a sign outside of the house welcoming everyone to the party. This is where my Cricut came into play.

Ignore the lack of "landscaping" as that's the next outdoor project for my husband! As you can tell inside the "restaurant" we added balloons and other Birthday decor. The menu board in the right corner is a 2 x 4 foot chalkboard my husband made. Here is a closer look:

To keep with the cooking theme, I bought a 4 x 6 picture album and converted it into a "Junior Chef" cookbook with my son's favorite recipes. I have it on display in the "restaurant".

And for a closer look we have the cover and then 2 of the recipes inside the cookbook:

Another decoration and game I made out of vinyl was just a fun little thing for the kids to find and count while working on their pizzas and cupcakes. Above the window I put the saying "Can you find the 10 pieces of pepperoni" and placed red circles and ovals out of vinyl randomly on the dining room walls.

And to ensure the party guests had something to carry all of their party favors home in, I needed to have a "To-Go" bag. I found some big dark red gift bags on clearance as they were labeled as "Christmas gift bags" and used my Cricut to decorate them.

I filled the "To-Go" bags with my son's cookbook, a pizza cutter, several cookie cutters, erasers in the shape of food, kitchen magnets of a pizza, hamburger and hotdog as well as a 5x7 plastic frame of the party guests that I took during the party.

Before the party could start we needed the Junior Chef. The Junior Chef already had a personalized apron and hat. But not a chef jacket so we bought him one as a special surprise for the party!

And here is our host with his full uniform on!

During the party, the kids brought their own aprons and the first task was to decorate paper chef hats.

And here is a group picture of all of the Junior Chefs with their newly decorated Chef Hats!

Then after some play time, the kids went back to the restaurant to make their own pizzas and decorate their own cupcakes.

While the pizzas were in the oven it was a perfect opportunity to open presents. My son very much enjoyed opening his presents!

And now it's time to eat the pizza and cupcakes the Junior Chefs worked so very hard to make!

And because the parents were at the party and helped out with all of the activities I could not leave them behind! In the kitchen, I had a special table set up for just the parents so they could decorate their very own cupcakes. Nearly all of the parents made one if not several cupcakes and worked very hard on them while enjoying a few good laughs along the way!

The party was a lot of work but was so much fun! And I think everyone had a good time, especially watching the kids decorate and eat their food!

Happy 4th Birthday Little Kevin!

DIY Chalkboard with a Vinyl Sign

A few posts prior to this I moved a group of picture frames from one wall to another spot in the house which left a big empty space just asking for something to fill it up. Since this big empty space is the wall that leads down into the basement family room I needed to ensure it was kid friendly (unlike the fragile, glass picture frames that were previously on the wall). So how do I fill up the empty space?? I had my husband build a 4 x 6 foot chalkboard on the wall.

We went to Home Depot and bought a sheet of 4 x 8 plywood and they cut it down to 4 x 6 for us. We used the remaining 2 x 4 piece for another room of the house. We bought some chalkboard paint and after several coats of paint and several days for everything to dry, my husband used his mighty air compressor and nail gun to attach the board to the wall. Then he took some floor trim, painted it white and framed the chalkboard.

When my husband finished his project, I went to work to make a vinyl sign for above the chalkboard. I finally settled on the saying, "Good times are never ending when we are playing and pretending" as it fit my boys perfectly.

This is what the wall looked like prior to moving the picture frames:

And this is our new wall complete with a DIY chalkboard:

I found the 2 red mailboxes in the $1 section at Target and they work perfectly to hold the chalk and eraser.

I love how the new chalkboard turned out and now I have my 5 year old Kindergartener giving me "school lessons" each day on his new chalkboard! :) And you might ask what did we do with that extra 2 x 4 foot piece of plywood? Well, we made a "menu board" for my son's Cooking Birthday Party.

Now that the party is over, we plan on framing it with white trim like the big chalkboard and keeping it in the kitchen for the boys to use while I'm cooking!

Family Eye Chart

I purchased a really nice and big picture frame on clearance for $2 about six months ago from Michaels. It has been collecting dust this entire time but I knew that once I came up with the right idea, the picture frame will be perfect! Long story short, while trying to finish decorating my bathroom I realized the really long metal art piece in the living room turned sideways would look perfect in the bathroom. So the bathroom is done and now I finally found a place for my $2 picture frame. I just need to vinyl it. : )

So this is how my project started:

The picture frame is $2, the matte board I bought with a 40% off coupon at Hobby Lobby making it $4.80. The rest of the materials is supplies I already have in my house. After several nights of designing the sign on my computer and then cutting, weeding the vinyl out, I have my finished eye chart.

I used dark blue vinyl to finish the sign. I could have used black but I thought this color would give it a little better look then just black and white. I also based my design off of a personalized eye chart I found on Red Envelope. I took that concept and related it to our family. I finished the chart by describing personal highlights of each member of the family. I loved how it turned out! And really love how my project cost less then $7 which is considerably cheaper then the eye chart on Red Envelope's website and it is created based solely on my family's "story".

Gallery Wall

One of my many goals this year is to finally finish decorating our house that we moved into over 2 1/2 years ago! I have many bare walls and too many areas of the house that need updating, the perfect example is our picture frames that have not been updated for nearly 2 1/2 years!

This project moved up to top priority only because I hurt my back and was confined to a chair for almost a week. The one thing I could do was sit with my laptop and search through hundreds of pictures. Once I updated all of the picture frames I wanted to move a group of picture frames from one wall to a different wall as I have a new project for the "yellow" wall which will hopefully be completed next weekend. This is what the first wall looked like before updating the pictures:

So, the picture is not very good. I didn't realize I didn't have a better picture until after I took everything down. But the yellow wall is what you see when you walk down into the basement into the big family room. This wasn't the best place for the pictures because the family room holds all of the balls, swords, plastic golf clubs, etc... that the boys play with all day and an accident was just waiting to happen. So we took down the vinyl and the frames, updated the frames and now moved it to this wall:

Now when you go upstairs from the basement (notice the yellow wall) you see the frames moved to the wall at the landing. And the other view is from the main floor looking down. Now I needed to add a vinyl saying but wanted something different then my last saying for these picture frames which said "...Because every picture has a story to tell". I then realized that every frame and every picture in the frame has either one or both of my sons in it. So I came up with the idea to do something that talks about my boys, specifically what they like. This is what I decided to do:

Now I need to add something above the light as well but for now I love how the pictures and vinyl sayings turned out! And if you also look closely in the pictures above, the wood right next to the hand rails changed colors! While I was updating the wall, my husband was staining the wood to match the darker colored hand rails he put in last Fall. : )

Hopefully next weekend I will have a new post on the updated yellow wall. I need my husband's help for part of it and due to his work schedule this week we just won't have time until next weekend to get it done!

Happy New Year!

My year is not starting off too good in the "blog" department considering this is the 17th day of 2012 and I do not have a new post yet! I did so well in December especially considering how busy the month was! Despite my lack of postings I have been busy and will have several new projects posted in the next few days.

My husband is being a trooper and helping me with all of these new projects that must be done "now" even though he has his own list of "Honey-Do" projects that I gave him! I won't give away what I'm working on but it does deal with chalkboard paint, picture frames, cookbooks, vinyl, gift bags, and floor trim. Ok, so maybe not all of those things are for one project but I have been using them all this last week and am hoping to finish these within the next few days.

So check back in the next couple of days to see some of the projects that I have been working on! :)

Cindy